"Houly saints!" said he, grasping his weapon, "it's yerself, ye mouldy scounthrel, that I've been waitin' to be at—may the Lord giye me strength!"
He stood now full upright, the fine picture of a man in the moonlight; and at the sound of his voice the crew in the fo'castle showed for a moment at the hatch again. Had Messenger been alone with him he would have ended the business then and there with his revolver, but he feared the crew, to whom the mate was even then something of a hero; and he knew that the sound of repeated firing might bring ships upon the tug. In this, however, was his mistake; and even as he stood, with the irresolution of an instant, the Irishman whirled the great bar round and made a mighty stroke at his head. But the blow had been dealt with too great a vigour; the smooth iron slipped from the man's grasp; the bar hurtled through the air with terrible force. It passed above the shoulder of Messenger, who had dropped upon one knee, and, missing him, struck Sydney Capel so full across the face that the bones of his forehead cracked at the blow, and he fell, with the life out of him, prone upon the deck. For a moment the horrid tragedy held the others speechless; the mate shivered as though intense cold had gripped him; the crew crouched backward as from a madman. Messenger alone kept his wits, and, before the now unarmed Irishman had got his courage again, he hit him with his fist and felled him, striking him again and again with heavy blows until the man had no more sense in him than a log of wood. Then he called for a length of rope, and, binding him hand and foot, left him as he lay and went back to the bridge.
The moment was one of the most critical in this strange man's history. The most trivial curiosity of a drunken sailor had in one half-hour threatened the giant superstructure of design he had created with so much labour. Here he was almost full in the track of ships plying to the Scheldt and to Holland, by no means ready for the transfer of the bullion to the yacht, lacking the animal cleverness of the dead Kess Robinson, with the deck of the tug bloodstained, and his partner in the felony no longer living either to participate in success or to share the shames of failure. Indeed, his predicament was one of vast dangers, for the crew of the Admiral had become paralyzed with the precipitancy of the fight, and crouched in their hammocks daft with terror; the engineer went to his work mechanically; the man White, who had come back to the wheel, muttered and crooned like a hag at a distaff. Not one of them had the veriest suggestion of action or any thing but fearsome languor in him; not one but shuddered every time he turned his eyes toward the spot where the dead man lay. Messenger, even with his wire-knit nerves, suffered for some time the contagion of the terror. He found himself pacing the bridge with nervous strides, or pausing in keen thought, or gazing out seaward, where the sweep of the horizon gave him sparse encouragement. Kenner's yacht still lay a couple of miles away from them; but there was a fleet of North Sea smacks upon the port quarter, and a couple of steamers stood out clear some three miles away in their course. Under other circumstances that was not the time to have acted. The danger of remark and observation was too palpable. The sinking of the tug might even be reported in London before the morning watch. Yet the man had a haunting wish to quit the scene of the deadly brawl at the first moment possible. He gained a new terror from the want of talk, and at last he called the engineer, a Scotchman, by name Alec Johnson, and set upon his questioning.
"Well," said he, "this is pretty work for a beginning."
"Ay, it's a sorra spectacle, man, and yer no cutting a fine appearance, may I tell ye," replied Johnson, as he stood at the foot of the ladder and hesitated to mount it.
"I don't want your opinions," said Messenger testily, "but your notions, if you've got any. Do you think it's time to be moving from this ship?"
The engineer shrugged his shoulders, suggesting his indifference.
"Well," said he, "you're dawdlin' in queersome company. I've no stomach myself to jawk wi' the dead, but the sea's muckle full of ships for what ye were thinking of."
"That's true. You've some glimmer of intelligence, any way," answered Messenger, as he resumed his sentry-like perambulation, pausing only at the second turn to continue his argument.
"Is all right below when the time comes?" he asked with some anxiety. "We've got to see this hulk out of sight five minutes after we leave her, any way."
"Man, ye can rest on that!" said the Scotchman; "she'll just flichter and go down like a bag wi' a stone in her; and look ye: there'll be mist afore the morn, and it may give ye shelter."
"So there will," cried the other, as he turned away, leaving the engineer to go below. And for a couple of hours the tug steamed onward, the thud of her paddles the only sound, her decks untenanted save for the solemn, wakeful man upon the bridge, and the moody, inert, sullen fellow who took the wheel. Day had now broken, with cold grey light and piercing white mist, which settled humidly upon ship and watchers, and hid the near sea so that neither the yacht of the American nor such packets or smacks as lay by them could be seen. But anon a great wave of dull red light split the vapour through, floating it on wings of radiant colour, or dissolving it so that at last the waste of green water, all capped with playing flecks of foam, lay clear to the view, and the invigorating freshness of morning seemed to call nature anew to the labours of the day. That hour, so superb in its breath of strength, so life-giving to him who rises from long sleep, was an hour of new fear to those that remained in the shambles of the tug. As the sun rose it seemed to lighten the face of the dead man, who lay as he had fallen, with a hideous, ghastly glare upon him, so that the crew, coming with a new courage a little way aft, shrunk back and implored to be set free, or cried out that they would all be taken, yet feared to touch the dread thing and send it to the sea, which engulfs the dead in so sure a resting-place. Messenger himself understood with his usual perception that the tension could not be long endured, and at the change of the watch (there being but one steamer other than the yacht in their wake, and she many miles on their port bow) he suddenly gave the order to go about, and stood boldly for the Semiramis',' though all the risk of the action was apparent to him.
The men, raving with delight at the thought of release from the unendurable prison, now came scampering up their ladder, though they did not venture abaft the foredeck; and in a moment all was activity. There were but five of the crew remaining, and of these one was almost a boy, who was called "Billy," and reckoned half dolt, half idiot. As for the mate, who had lain near the fore hatch apparently insensible, and bound since the fray, he was forgotten by all in the thirst for change at whatever risk or price. The new course was, it may be imagined, at once observed by those on the Semiramis who fell to signalling; and in a run of ten minutes the tug had come alongside the big yacht, and, being grappled, twenty hands hoisted the bullion to the crane, and guided it over the aft hatchway. It was no time for greeting, no time for any thing but a babel of voices, a quick pumping of donkey-engines, a bustle, a confusion, and a riot when the men from the tug tumbled pell-mell upon the yacht, and the dead were forgotten, and the bound man below had no mercy from the hungry wolves who clustered about the gold.
The exciting work occupied some twenty minutes in performance, and having been accomplished, Roger Burke, upon the bridge of the Semiramis roared the order: "Let her go!" The tug swung away from the hull of the greater vessel almost with his words, and a few powerful strokes from the twin screws separated the doomed ship and the other by several cables' lengths. At the distance they waited for the end, but before the end could be there was an apparition upon the bridge of the Admiral which sent pallor to the faces of the exultant crew, and drew from the men cries of rage and of apprehension. For suddenly, as the tug drifted, the man who had been bound and forgotten, Mike Brennan, the mate, appeared by the wheel, and with frenzied imprecations called threats from Heaven upon the watchers and their ship. During one moment he stood, and then there came a great dull roar as of a mighty explosion in the engine-room below him; and the little steamer, heeling to the shock, cocked her stern above the playing waves, and in the next instant had plunged below them.
With the gurgle of the hull the mate disappeared; but as he went the voice of Billy, the daft boy, was heard in triumphant exclamation—
"I cut him free, I did it; who'll hear Billy, oh, dam clever, dam clever!"